ABSTRACT
The most important event that occurred during my years in Kiev was the assassination of Emperor Alexander II on March 1, 1881. That evening I and my wife were at the theater when an acquaintance, Mme. Mering, in the next box, informed us that the Emperor had been killed. I immediately left the theater and wrote a letter to my Uncle Fadeev, then living in Petersburg. In this letter, in which emotion prevailed over reason, I said that our government had failed in its efforts against the anarchists because it had used inappropriate methods, as if it were trying to crush a microscopic grain of sand with the kind of steam hammer we have in our railroad shops. Although the revolution then was not comparable to the revolution of 1905–1906, it had managed to achieve some successes, culminating in the assassination of our Emperor. I argued that we must fight the anarchists with their own weapons, which could not be employed by the government but could be employed by a society of men of the utmost probity. Every time the anarchists prepared or made an attempt on the life of the Sovereign, the society should respond by ruthlessly killing them. This was the only way, I said, we could fight them and succeed in frightening them out of their efforts to hunt down our Sovereign. 1
